You can probably determine the emotional-political register of Britain through the songs that are sung at sporting events. And right now, “Keir Starmer’s a wanker” has become so omnipresent, so all-inviting, that even highly tribalised football fans have put aside their rivalries to sing it. Sky and ITV partially mute the ditty from their live sports broadcasts, trying to avoid transmitting political statements, but at this point, it’s barely a political statement at all. It is more like a display of mass casual bullying, a playground chant carried out on a national level.
After the scandalous past week – Mandelson, McSweeney, resignation scare – some widespread antipathy might be expected. But the important thing is that this sentiment set in long ago. Starmer is incredibly unpopular. The Economist has a special page that exhibits and examines this unpopularity among varying demographics. The scale of ostracism it represents for one man is spectacular. And the results are in: the people of Britain do not like Starmer.
It wasn’t always like this – Starmer was sort of a centrist champion during the Brexit period, and had some momentum during the succession of Tory governments. But after an election campaign that is difficult to remember, the Prime Minister has become profoundly unpopular. Tony Blair was voted “Britain’s worst person” in a 2003 Channel 4 show, but went on to win another election two years later. Starmer, on the other hand, can barely win the full loyalty of his party. Despite “Fuck Boris” becoming a youth phenomenon during his premiership, but there was always the sense that he could pull it out of the bag when needed. Starmer’s government, meanwhile, has, at times, been less popular than Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
And this scale of dislike means the political is entwined with the personal. Try as he might, Starmer is not a slick, dynamic, showy presence; he appears to be an anxious, awkward, appeasing kind of type. He comes from a working-class background in the most middle-class part of Britain – a niche narrative that was always going to be hard to convey. He loves football, but won’t commit to the spikier aspects of it, denying his passion like a suburban Dad who claims to not know what PornHub is. He was a lawyer – and a good one – but Atticus Finch he is not. He was the kind of lawyer that excelled in picking over details and data, not in winning over erring juries. He comes from a technical, institutional, sensible world that looks bygone in the Acid Patriotism era, where some of those at far-right protests perform Nazi salutes to Eurodance classics.
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Perceptions and expectations of masculinity weigh heavily on Starmer. For swathes of the public, something about him just doesn’t sit quite right. To call upon some cheap personality polling, men don’t want to be his mate and women don’t want to give him a hug. Much of the time, he appears on the verge of tears, like he’d be more at home chairing some obscure committee than standing over the lectern. Perhaps in Sweden this might work. But in Britain – a country that still values pomp, character and how you look in the cockpit of a Harrier jet – it doesn’t.
The term “charisma void” is thrown around a lot about Starmer, but it goes well beyond personality politics. He could also be accused of being a policy void, an ideas void, a conviction void, a gaping absence of almost everything people now want a leader to be. None of these epithets are entirely fair, because Starmer does show conviction at times – but usually it comes late and lopsided, too limp at times and too steadfast at others. It’s telling that his major scandal has come not from being proactively corrupt or delinquent, but being deferential – to the Blair guard, who arrived carrying more baggage than a Saudi royal delegation. All the briefings suggest that it was McSweeney pushing for Mandelson’s appointment, and that Starmer really had his doubts about him. But that inability to say “Peter Mandelson? Are you insane?” has sucked him into a vortex of shame.
The “Keir Starmer’s a wanker” phenomenon has of course been driven by people who would be his political enemies anyway. Using the same tactics (fast courts, heavy sentences) against the 2024 race rioters as he did with the 2011 rioters may have seemed like a way to win over the left at the time. But it set him on a collision course with Angry Britain. From then on, almost every charge going, from sex offenders to other protestors, would inevitably be compared to those sentences. It’s a difficult position to be put in, but ultimately, he made martyrs of idiots and then spent a lot of time scrabbling back from it. On the left, too, a collective moral revulsion has occurred. Starmer’s lamentable “just stop” plea to Netanyahu, his inability to confront a rampaging American administration, and his failure to get a handle on a creaking, fracturing political culture will also be held up as examples of his failure. Gaza is the reason many young people tipped from “dislike” to “hate”.
But Mandelson and McSweeney aside, there is only really one person he can blame. There is one mood at the heart of Starmer’s personality, or at least its outward projection, which is incompatible with public feeling. More than anything, Starmer’s leadership has been tainted with an air of complacency. He seems to have come into the job thinking it was a walkover, an easy 4-0, “bring on the kids at 60 minutes” job. It was anything but. The country he took over is very different to the one his initial plan was hatched for, and the global stage he walked onto is particularly chaotic.
Britain lives in the midst of a multi-front, civil-culture war. The divisions are not even party-political, but demographic and largely digital. The battle lines are not Labour vs Tory, North vs South, old vs young – but Facebook vs TikTok, “British” vs not, drink chlorine vs don’t, flee to Dubai or die trying. Worldwide, there are genocides, land grabs, head of state grabs, potential revolutions and a bizarre lurch to Christian fundamentalism. Having a PM who wants to be “more like Sweden”, as I recall one pundit describing Starmer’s Britain on election night, is a nice idea. But feels a bit like trying to practice cognitive behavioural therapy at a coke-induced Aintree brawl.
In such a landscape, the complacency – smugness, even – which seems to sit at the core of Starmer is inadmissible. It places him at odds with the freewheeling radicalism of the age, but equally does not gift him the heroics to stand up to it. At time of writing, he is moving like Tony in the last series of The Sopranos, gone to the mattress with a handful of loyalists and an assault rifle, waiting for his assassins to reveal themselves. For a man who made a big noise about de-radicalisation, his ineffectiveness has pushed even his loyalists into becoming plotters. But the public – from the football terraces and Palestine Action, to Strictly fans and the organised far right – are already in open rebellion.
[Further reading: Keir Starmer’s silver lining]
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